LCIL International Law Centre Podcast

Contrasting how Malcolm X and Hannah Arendt approached the question of human rights, this lecture examines how violence is central and hierarchy is intrinsic to the political operations of humanity. It argues that talking about humanity requires a preparedness to examine the violent legacies of humanism, including its anti-colonial kinds. Dr Ayça Çubukçu is Associate Professor in Human Rights and Co-Director of LSE Human Rights at London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the author of For the Love of Humanity: The world Tribunal on Iraq.

Lecture summary: The problem confronting the users of international law, whether academic or professional, is very often not whether a rule of customary law has come into existence (as has recently been handled with such success by the ILC), but rather, granted that a rule of customary law on a given subject does exist, how to establish what its specific content is, for the purpose of then applying it to a particular situation. This applies not only to reasoned judicial decision but should also inform the processes of legal advice and decision-making based upon it. Ultimately what this may amount to is the assessment and weighing of the opinions of others. Rule of law considerations dictate that this can’t be a matter of subjective preference but must be based on known principles, i.e. to determine which opinions carry authority. The talk will investigate some of the issues involved, in the light, particularly, of Article 38 of the ICJ Statute. Sir Franklin (Frank) Berman joined HM Diplomatic Service in 1965 and was the Legal Adviser to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office from 1991-99. For the past 17 years he has been in practice in Essex Court Chambers specializing in international arbitration and advisory work in international law. He is Visiting Professor of International Law at Oxford and the University of Cape Town, and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the British Institute of International & Comparative Law. His career in international law and diplomacy has spanned a wide and varied field, including settlement of disputes; the law of treaties; State responsibility; diplomatic and State immunity; maritime delimitation; the law of the Continental shelf; outer space and nuclear energy; the law of international organisations; the UN Security Council; the laws of war and neutrality; international criminal tribunals; and numerous other areas. He is a Member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, a former Judge ad hoc of the International Court of Justice, and was the Legal Member of the Court of Arbitration between Pakistan and India under the Indus Waters Treaty. He has sat on numerous ICSID arbitral and annulment proceedings. He is the general editor of the Oxford International Law Library.

Lecture summary: At various points throughout this work, Grotius makes reference to a category that he variously calls 'morals' (moralia), 'moral things' (res morales) or 'the matter of morals' (materia moralis). This field of entities is always invoked in conjunction with certain principles of reasoning that shape the scope and application of more strictly legal principles and reasoning. This lecture looks at how 'moral' reasoning intersects with legal reasoning to produce Grotius's distinctive view of the international order. I argue that it is the appeal to 'morals' that allows him to craft a jurisprudence that accommodates the concrete realities of power within and between states while still differentiating itself from politics and reason of state. Dr Annabel Brett is a Reader in the History of Political Thought, University of Cambridge and Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

Lecture summary: The role of civil society in drafting and the adoption of the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court (ICC) is well known, as is the contribution of civil society to advocating for states to ratify the Statute and implement its provisions. However, despite the importance of these contributions, such opportunities do not constitute direct participation in the formal proceedings of the ICC. Other than the role of civil society actors as a witness, be it as an expert or a factual witness, there is only one option for direct participation of civil society in ICC proceedings: that is, to participate as an amicus curiae. States, too, have more limited rights of participation in proceedings before the ICC, particularly in comparison to other international institutions. However, the proceedings may raise issues of direct relevance to a state or broader relevance to several states, including states parties and non states-parties. Where the Rome Statute legal framework does not provide for formal rights of participation for states, states too must rely on the amicus curiae mechanism. This lecture addresses the practice in relation to the amicus curiae in proceedings before the ICC, particularly the reliance on this mechanism by both civil society actors and states. It sets out the legal framework for the amicus curiae in the ICC, analyses the types of actors that have sought to appear as amici curiae, and examines the process and criteria applied by ICC Chambers when considering applications, as well as the range of topics on which amici have sought to make submissions. It concludes that the ICC has so far been cautious in its approach to the amicus curiae; however, amici – particularly states – can influence outcomes at the ICC.

This talk will consider the changes which have taken place in recent years in attitudes towards questions of public international law and of foreign affairs when they arise in the context of domestic litigation. David Lloyd Jones, Lord Lloyd-Jones, became a Justice of The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom in October 2017. Lord Lloyd-Jones was born and brought up in Pontypridd, Glamorgan. He attended Pontypridd Boys' Grammar School and Downing College, Cambridge of which he was a Fellow from 1975 to 1991. At the Bar his practice included international law, EU law and public law. He was amicus curiae (independent advisor to the court) in the Pinochet litigation before the House of Lords. Lord Lloyd-Jones was appointed to the High Court in 2005. From 2008 to 2011 he served as a Presiding Judge on the Wales Circuit and Chair of the Lord Chancellor's Standing Committee on the Welsh Language. In 2012 he was appointed a Lord Justice of Appeal and from 2012 to 2015 he was Chairman of the Law Commission. Lord Lloyd-Jones is the first Justice of the Supreme Court to come from Wales.

Lecture Summary: The lecture will consider the role of the conflict of laws before international courts and tribunals. Very rarely is the conflict of laws examined in the writings on public international law or is applied in the decisions of international courts and tribunals. And that is surprising given that disputes that become the subject of adjudication before investment courts and tribunals are necessarily cross-border in nature. And their cross-border character undoubtedly calls for the partitioning of legal issues among legal systems. The lecture will examine a number of inter-related issues: 1) which conflict of laws rules are to be used by international courts and tribunals in determining the rights and obligations at the municipal law, 2) what is the use, if any, of the conflict of laws in interpreting international treaties, 3) the broader question of interrelation between public international law and private international law. Dr Hayk Kupelyants is the Clifford Chance Lecturer in the Conflict of Laws at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Homerton College. He is the author of 'Sovereign Defaults before Domestic Courts' (OUP 2018).

​In this talk, Anthea Roberts will introduce her new book Is International Law International? which was awarded the American Society of International Law's 2018 Book Prize for the preeminent contribution to creative scholarship. Anthea Roberts is Associate Professor in the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) at the Australian National University. She specializes in public international law, investment treaty law and arbitration, and comparative international law. Anthea previously taught at the London School of Economics as well as Columbia and Harvard Law Schools.

Lecture summary: Recent literature on human rights has proposed to go beyond the dualism of essentialist versus historicist conceptions of human rights. It is argued that ‘the history of human rights’ has to be expanded as ‘to include a moral history of the century after the Enlightenment’ (Hoffmann). This lecture highlights as well the inquiry of continuities within the epistemological framework of human rights and natural rights. I am employing for this purpose historical understandings of natural rights and the role they played in the history of international law. The theologian-jurist Francisco de Vitoria and the jurist-theologian Hugo Grotius, the so-called fathers of the discipline of international law, and later other authors, such as John Locke, became famous for detaching natural subjective rights from their original roots in individual moral theology and relocating them in the context of encounters between peoples. The fact that in doing so they contributed to a new form of natural law and arguably founded international law meant that their moral-epistemological endeavours bore significant fruit.

Part 1: From Colonial Companies to Global Corporations In this lecture, I will introduce the problematic of the corporation in international law. The modern corporation is often understood to be a child of the state, a child which has grown too powerful to control. However, we need to go back further than the advent of the modern corporation in order to see that the Company emerged in the early modern period not as a child of the state but rather as a form of associational life which exercised public authority and which rivalled other such forms, including the state. In this lecture, I will suggest ways in which a richer understanding of the history of the corporation and its jurisprudential form can illuminate contemporary patterns of global ordering. Part 2: Decolonisation and Battles over Global Corporations and International Law This lecture will trace the struggles over the question of the corporation, how it should be conceptualized, and its proper relation to international law during the period bookended by the end of the Second World War, and the end of the Cold War. It will focus in particular on the attempt in 1974, by the ‘Group of 77’ developing states, to assert international legal control over trans or multi-national corporations through the establishment of the Commission on Transnational Corporations, as well as consider the rivalrous jurisprudence and institutional initiatives emerging at the same time. Part 3: Contemporary Patterns of Ordering: Business and Human Rights and International Investment Law This lecture will consider what happened to the earlier struggles over the global corporation, once history ‘ended’, and three worlds putatively became one. It will trace the twin emergence of International Investment Law, and Business and Human Rights, in order to ask what account of the international - and what kind of world - is authored and authorised by those ‘regimes’.

The Lauterpacht Centre for International Law held a Symposium on Friday, 13 October 2017 to celebrate the life and work of its founder, Sir Elihu Lauterpacht CBE QC LLD, Honorary Professor Emeritus of International Law at the University of Cambridge, Fellow of Trinity College, and founder and Honorary Fellow of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, who died on 8 February 2017. The video provides a snapshot of the symposium.